Variant

"While I do not profess to understand the 'modern' music, I have long been involved in the development of the ...

"While I do not profess to understand the 'modern' music, I have long been involved in the development of the mammoth as an instrument. In my earliest experiments, a trio of courageous musicians produced the most remarkable assortment of sounds from a single properly tuned and securely tethered beast."

Lately, author/illustrator David Macauley's been hosting a PBS series on architecture. Pretty smart, talented guy. That last bit's from 1988's The Way Things Work, his tome of plain-talk and illustrated explanations of commonplace devices. Could Macauley have known that so many of his juvenile-aimed jaunts describing a fictional cartoon mammoth's integral place in technology's advance might so aptly comment upon Toe's Variant some twelve years hence?

Apparently, Toe's been on that "mammoth-as-instrument" trajectory Macauley wrote about for some time. Here, leader David Pavkovic's "securely tethered beast" is Yoko Noge, whose Japanese avant-nightclub rants render Variant's opener, "Absolutism 2," a tribal-- some might say "pachydermal"-- throwback to art-rock's pre-history. "Vacation" again features Yoko, this time woolier still as the nonsense-spewing, blue velvet-sporting chanteuse fom a bar scene I'm relieved David Lynch had the good sense not to film. Pavkovic's drums stop and start jazzily enough in the dark heart of this number and his Oval-esque keys trickle along congruently. But when Yoko lumbers into Pavkovic's pauses, the experimentalist tone is punctured in ways all too familiar to those of us who never preferred John Lennon's "better half."

"Although the instruments often grew restless during rehearsals, the twelve musicians, comprising four tusk-tappers, four stomach-thumpers and four tail-twangers, became highly proficient at playing them."

Hmm... a fantastical modern mammoth orchestra. Toe (formerly Toe 2000-- modern!) comprises an ensemble just about as esoteric as Macauley envisions, but much less interesting to listen to. Pavkovic and Noge are joined by Tortoise phenom and consistently listenable Jeff Parker on guitar. His loose and understated phrasework opens "Absolutism 1," but is brutally stampeded by Yoko Noge's unaccompanied intrusion just after the four-minute mark. The ubiquitous Doug McCombs contributes in your basic "guy from Tortoise" mode, his talents lost to over-sampling on "Vacation," and later, to Yoko's mewling.

And how sure were you that Tim Kinsella had already wasted enough of your time? Variant also manages to squeeze in his vocal panhandling. His pitiable melodrama masquerades as art on no fewer than three of these tracks, most notably "Totalism." A barely audible Kinsella whispers exactly the type of drivel I never want to hear again, timing his utterances to fill the sections of drum-machined lounge dirge not made hideous by Noge's croaking inane howling: "You will perform a manuever/ To satisfy your reintroduction." If I'm not trying very hard to translate exactly what Tim and Yoko are singing about, it's because, given the context, I couldn't give a shit less.

"The popularity of massed mammoth music reached its peak with the creation of the Mammoth Tabernacle Choir."

Right now, you're annoyed by my reliance on this gimmick to underscore the pointlessness of Toe's Variant. I'm guessing that's because you haven't actually heard Toe's Variant. Its vague and thinly composed drums-and-synth architecture sways in the wind of Noge's breathy pretensions, and topples due to its essential songlessness. Of ten tracks, only "New" commands any attention, a tinkled piano melody dusted over undulating bass and drums. The track recalls Sam Prekop's solo work, but is hardly on par with it.

The same way David Macauley's idiotic, mastodon-concerned sidebars pointlessly interrupt an otherwise informative children's book, Toe (and Yoko Noge's avant-garbage, in particular) contributes nothing to the cause it aligns itself with. Like a joke you have to explain, Variant is very little effort, effortlessly wasted.